[WikiEN-l] Jason Calancis on Wikipedia's technological obscurantism

[Phil Sandifer]

On Oct 13, 2007, at 9:40 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> http://www.calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurification- 
> three-ways-wikipedia-keeps-99-of/
>
> (no, he didn't know the word "obscurantism.")
>
> Discussion please.
>

His point about talk pages is particularly good - I doubt a lot of  
the templatecruft we put on talk pages is worthwhile given the  
oppressively long amount of non-text that it brings up when one tries  
to edit.

At the very least, we should move things like WikiProjects, GA  
nomination statuses, and other such pieces of processcruft to a  
subpage and transclude it so that newbies trying to discuss on talk  
pages just get "{{single template link}}". We could probably afford  
to do the same with infoboxes and the like on main articles - move  
them to a subpage and transclude a single template. Yes, it makes  
editing the infobox a step less intuitive, but someone who can't  
figure that step out probably can't handle the template syntax anyway.

-Phil